ughout the
United States where UFO's were most frequently seen. We hoped that
photos of the UFO's taken through the diffraction gratings would give
us some proof one way or the other.

The diffraction gratings we planned to use over the lenses of the
cameras were the same thing as prisms; they would split up the light
from the UFO into its component parts so that we could study it and
determine whether it was a meteor, an airplane, or balloon reflecting
sunlight, etc. Or we might be able to prove that the photographed UFO
was a craft completely foreign to our knowledge.

A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a
section at ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of
obtaining the cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and
built.

But the UFO's weren't waiting around till they could be
photographed. Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a
little more.

By the end of June it was very noticeable that most of the better
reports were coming from the eastern United States. In Massachusetts,
New Jersey, and Maryland jet fighters had been scrambled almost
nightly for a week. On three occasions radar-equipped F-94's had
locked on aerial targets only to have the lock-on broken by the
apparent violent maneuvers of the target.

By the end of June there was also a lull in the newspaper publicity
about the UFO's. The forthcoming political conventions had wiped out
any mention of flying saucers. But on July 1 there was a sudden
outbreak of good reports. The first one came from Boston; then they
worked down the coast.

About seven twenty-five on the morning of July 1 two F-94's were
scrambled to intercept a UFO that a Ground Observer Corps spotter
reported was traveling southwest across Boston. Radar couldn't pick
it up so the two airplanes were just vectored into the general area.
The F-94's searched the area but couldn't see anything. We got the
report at ATIC and would have tossed it out if it hadn't been for
other reports from the Boston area at that same time.

One of these reports came from a man and his wife at Lynn,
Massachusetts, nine miles northeast of Boston. At seven-thirty they
had noticed the two vapor trails from the climbing jet interceptors.
They looked around the sky to find out if they could see what the
jets were after and off to the west they saw a bright silver "cigar-
shaped object about six times as long as it was wide" traveling
southwest acro